existence. Who could cope with that? So we could say we’ve failed… or we could seek out substitutes, who might not be able to do anything. Or who might make all the difference in the world. My partner has gone to get Shavi. I’m here for you and Laura. So, will you come back? Not for me, but for everybody. For Existence.’
There was a long period of silence when the only sound was the howling wind beyond the cathedral walls. Then Ruth leaned forward and turned the full force of those dark, devastated eyes on Hunter. ‘Let me tell you something. I loved Jack Churchill. More than I love myself. He was everything to me, and when he died it felt as if everything inside me shattered into a million pieces. Nothing, trust me, nothing comes even close to the pain I feel inside, and I’ve been through a lot of suffering in my short, unhappy life. Church had everything going for him. He was filled with the Blue Fire. All the prophecies spoke about how important he was to the future. He was going to lead us into some golden age. And still he died. You want to know what it means to be a Brother of Dragons? That’s what it means: hope, strife, failure. Not even the best can win. You just hold the line.’
‘I can live with that-’
She silenced him with a raised hand. ‘They tell you grief fades with time. What I feel for Church won’t fade. It’s beyond grief. The price I personally paid for our success during the Fall was too high. Far too high. So don’t come asking me to do it all again. I don’t care any more… about anything. I’m just going to sit here, while the world freezes around me, and wait for it all to fade away to nothing.’
The desolation in her words was almost too painful to hear. Hunter could see that what she had been through had fractured her, but he couldn’t afford to back down. ‘Please… what’s at stake-’
‘I know what’s at stake,’ she said, ‘and I don’t care. You’re wasting your breath.’
‘If you don’t come, that’s it. Our last hope gone. You’re the one consigning us all to the end.’
She held up one hand, palm outwards, and a freezing wind hit Hunter; he could feel ice forming across his face and body. With an effort, he tried to resist it, but whatever she was doing, she simply turned it up a notch until he realised that she would quite happily see him freeze to death. In the end, there was nothing he could do but leave.
Outside the cavern, Laura was waiting. ‘Don’t think badly of her.’
‘How can I not?’ Hunter snapped. ‘She’s killed everyone.’
‘She might not be able to make a difference anyway.’ Laura touched his face, soothing the anger and disbelief out of him. ‘She loved Church, and she couldn’t cope with losing him. Emotions rule us, Hunter; there’s nothing we can do about it. That’s the way we were made, and we were made that way for a reason.’
‘Well, if that’s true, I can’t see it.’ He sucked in a deep breath, still coming to terms with the fact that he’d failed. ‘I’d better get back.’
‘I’m coming with you.’
That surprised him; what little he knew of her had suggested that she would be the selfish, indifferent one. ‘What’s the point? You’ll just be coming back to die.’
‘We’ve got to try, haven’t we?’ She grinned defiantly. ‘That’s the job. Come on, I need to find a horse.’ She turned and headed off back through the tunnels as if there was still hope.
Chapter Thirteen
‘ Vae, puto deus fio.’
(‘Oh dear, I must be turning into a god.’)
In the reverent depths of the Bodleian Library, Hal pored over a mountain of dusty volumes, but his mind was elsewhere. While reading the same page over and over again, he was back in the helicopter on the return journey from Shugborough Hall, adrenalin racing through his system, his heart pounding fit to burst, and the snowy countryside sweeping past beneath in a magical procession. And Samantha was pressed tight against him, her head on his shoulder, her arm entwined around his, and she was whispering the words he would never forget.
‘You saved my life, Hal. I don’t know what I’d ever do without you.’
And then there had been the kiss. On his cheek, admittedly, but it had not been chaste, he was sure; certainly not overtly sexual, either, but filled with a deep affection.
The scene played over and over in his mind. The seeds were so small, he didn’t dare give them too much credence, but a tiny part of him refused to let go: there was hope; she wasn’t completely devoted to Hunter; when the crunch came, she’d prefer Hal’s decency over Hunter’s louche amorality.
He was so lost to his ever-entwining mind games that he almost missed the item for which he had been searching. Just as he was about to turn the page of the two-hundred-year-old book he had been sifting through, his subconscious flagged up a tiny reproduction of The Shepherds of Arcadia. Hal read the accompanying information once, then again, this time taking it in, and finally a third time with avid concentration.
‘Samantha!’ he called out. ‘I’ve found something!’
Samantha ran over from another table where she had been hidden from his view behind a wall of books.
She hung over his left shoulder and peered at the text. Hal could feel the warmth of her skin, smell her perfume, but he forced himself to concentrate.
‘Listen to this,’ he said, and began to read from the book. ‘“The phrase Et in Arcadia Ego cannot be traced to any classical source. When asked of its origins, Nicolas Poussin maintained a puzzling silence. Yet on several occasions he told of a strange meeting. It occurred in sixteen thirty-seven, shortly before Poussin began work on his famous painting Les Bergers d’Arcadie, when, according to the artist, a young man with blue skin mysteriously appeared in his studio and entreated him to paint his first work on the subject. The angelic messenger’s details were specific, and included the curious phrase, but Poussin was induced to take the secret of his painting to his grave. Poussin always grew pale when questioned about this night-time visitor. But whatever was said to him in the privacy of his studio on that occasion encouraged him to begin work on his painting the next morning, in a feverish state according to his closest friends.”’
Hal stared at the page for a moment, then looked into Samantha’s face, so close to his own. ‘I don’t know about “angelic messenger” or “blue skin”, but that certainly sounds like a visitor from the Otherworld.’
‘But why would someone from the Otherworld visit Nicolas Poussin in Rome and force him to paint The Shepherds of Arcadia? ’
‘Because,’ Hal said, ‘they wanted to preserve a clue that could be discovered hundreds of years later. Maybe they knew Poussin was going to be a great artist and that all his works would be well known down the years.’
‘But why all those centuries back?’
Hal thought about that for a moment. ‘Perhaps the strange visitor didn’t set off all that time ago.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘All the legends say that time is odd in T’ir n’a n’Og. It doesn’t move in straight lines. Maybe there’s no such thing as time there at all.’
‘You’re making my head hurt.’
‘Maybe the gods can access any point in time they want from the Otherworld. And maybe they picked Poussin because…’ He paused, reordered his thoughts. ‘OK, how about this? What if Thomas Anson had a similar meeting with, say, a blue-skinned man who encouraged him to commission The Shepherds of Arcadia in reverse for the Shepherds’ Monument at Shugborough?’
‘We don’t know that.’
Hal shrugged and pressed on. ‘And what if these gods were influencing our world all the time, but they passed into legend as angels?’ he said excitedly. ‘Or demons. Didn’t William Blake supposedly see some hideous figure before he painted Ghost of a Flea? ’
‘I have no idea,’ Samantha said with some amusement.
